Polls Close in Iraq Election

Polls Close in Iraq Election

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A resident casts her vote at a polling station in Baghdad's Sadr City March 7, 2010. Bomb and rocket attacks killed at least 24 people as Iraqis voted on Sunday in a parliamentary election that put Iraq's security forces and its fledgling democracy to the test before U.S. troops leave. (REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani)

Polling
stations have closed in Iraq's parliamentary election, in a vote marred
by violence as a series of explosions left at least 38 people dead and
89 others wounded in the capital, Baghdad.

Millions of people turned out to cast their ballots across the
country on Sunday, for the second full parliamentary election since the
2003 US-led invasion.

About
19 million voters were eligible to choose from more than 6,000
candidates from 86 political groups looking to gain seats in the
325-member assembly.

But the vote came against a backdrop of deadly attacks.

The bloodiest toll was from an explosion that destroyed a
residential building in the Shaab district of northern Baghdad, killing
25 people and wounding at least eight more.

Initial reports indicated that dynamite was used to blow up the building, the interior ministry official said.

Polling stations targeted

Al
Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Baghdad, said the series of mortar
attacks and blasts from improvised explosive devices overshadowed the
start of voting.

"The apparent target were polling stations though none was directly
damaged in any of the attacks. After that very dangerous start, voting
proceeded fairly smoothly," he said.

"At this point it's still
unclear exactly how large the turnout was, but reports from most areas
indicate that the turnout was very satisfactory as far as those who
want to see a successful poll process go are concerned."

Nouri al-Maliki,
the incumbent Iraqi prime minister, whose State of Law coalition is
claiming credit for improved security since the peak of sectarian
warfare in 2006-07, dismissed Sunday's attacks as "just noises to scare
the Iraqi people from voting".

"But I know the Iraqi people. They have conviction. When there is a
challenge, they persevere, and you will see for yourselves the large
number of people that come out to vote."

Voting scenes

Elsewhere, Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from Sulaymaniyah, in
Kurdistan region, said a member of the provincial council of Mosul,
Qusay Abbas, was shot dead in the disputed area of Shabak.

"Mosul is a tense city and there is still no real political reconciliation between Arabs and Kurds," she said.

"Today we are seeing a lot of Arabs turning up at the polling
stations who want to be part of the political process, from which they
have been away for many years, which has weakened them and given Kurds
more clout in the Iraqi parliament."

The election was supervised by as many as 120 international
monitors, with a number of foreign embassies providing staff to act as
observers.

Al Jazeera's Omar Chatriwala, who accompanied a team of
UN monitors on a tour of several cities, saw about 200 people in a
polling station on the outskirts of Ramadi at around 9:30am.

"The voting co-ordinator said there had been no problems," he said.
"Another co-ordinator, who was in charge of six polling stations, said
3,000 people had turned out to vote in the first couple of hours."

Secular agendas

Voters were choosing between a broad range of parties and coalitions and no bloc is expected to win a majority.

After the last national election in 2005, it took the various political parties about five months to agree on a prime minister and for a cabinet to be approved.

Our correspondent, Mike Hanna, said: "In the past, people have
tended to vote along sectarian lines. But now, no governing coalition
can come to power unless it has the widest possible breadth of support.

"So
political parties and coalitions have been fighting a campaign not on
sectarian issues, but on the wider issues of Iraqi nationalism."

Al-Maliki is taking on political opponents tapping into exasperation
with years of conflict, poor public services and corruption, and hoping
to gain support from a once-dominant Sunni minority.

Iyad Allawi,
a former prime minister who heads the cross-sectarian, secularist
Iraqiya list, is already complaining about irregularities in early
voting, setting the scene for possible challenges to the election's
integrity.

Hasan Salman, a representative of the Iraqi National Alliance (INA)
- the successor of the United Iraqi Alliance, which has dominated the
government since the December 2005 elections - also claimed voting
irregularities.

"The government is using its power to steer things to its interest," he told Al Jazeera.

"We are scared the result will be fraudulent. There are 19 million
Iraqis qualified to vote, but there are 25 million voting slips, and we
still have not received an answer why extra 6 million slips were
printed."

The Iraqi electoral commission is to announce preliminary results on
March 10-11, based on votes from about 30 per cent of the polling
stations.

The supreme court would then certify the poll results, after hearing appeals, within about a month of the election.

Further

With the toxic Bibi circus in town - cue talk of "tentacles of terror" - find hope in the extraordinary Combatants For Peace, a joint effort by weary Israeli and Palestinian veterans of violence who've laid down their guns to fight for peace. Led by a former IDF soldier and Fatah militant who both lost daughters to the conflict's "unrightable wrongs," they insist on the need to "hear what is painful" and talk to your 'enemies': "Partners for peace always exist. You only have to look for them."